General Introduction

"The symbols of human sensuality are more explicit
in the Roman air of The Marble Faun than in any
other work of Hawthorne's--and the conclusions of the artist
are more repressive....

"There was a tragic element in Hawthorne's painful
solitude, [Emerson] said, 'which, I suppose, could not
longer be endured, and he died of it.' And The Marble
Faun was the final and extreme literary drama which
was wrought out of this artist's divided personality, close
here to breaking. But we should also remember the marvelous
complexity of the novel's thought, the human warmth that
pervades the narrative, the ironic humor that plays over it,
the pungent realism that so often cuts through this baroque
romance of the haunted heart."

background

Rome, in 1860, was occupied by Napoleon III's troops and
under a despotic papal government of Pius IX, who reacted in
a conservative fashion to the short republic of 1849-50, led
by Mazzini and Garabaldi
(Margaret Fuller had run a hospital for
the revolutionaries). [Rup71
xix]

"Of direct relevance to The Marble Faun
was the system of papal justice. Trials were held secretly
and usually conducted in Latin by the clergy; the accused
was held incommunicado and sometimes languished for years
between his arrest and his trial; no cross-examination by
defense counsel was allowed; there was no court of appeal;
and the accused was punished secretly. Publication of the
trial proceedings days or weeks after the execution of
sentence took the form of long strips of paper pasted on
walls and billboards in out-of-the-way corners of the city.
Thus the mysterious disappearance of Hilda and Donatello at
the end of the book is not a bit of gratuitous mystification
on Hawthorne's part, but standard legal procedure."
[Rup71 xxv]

"For taken as a whole Hawthorne's Rome and his
romance mark the end of the romantic sensibility in the
mainstream of American literature. As he says in his
Preface, 'romance
and poetry, like ivy, lichens, and
wall-flowers, need Ruin to make them grow.' The impact of
the Civil War on the American imagination made his work a
ruin in a double sense. And for the twentieth-century
reader, the basic problem is to recover the romantic
sensibility which the ruins in The Marble Faun
suggest." [Rup71 xxv]

"Nathalia Wright in 'Hawthorne and the Praslin
Murder' [Wri42]
cites an analogue for the case of Miriam in the murder and
suicide of the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin over an affair
with his governess, Mlle. Henriette Deluzy-Desportes, a woman whom
Hawthorne may have been introduced to in 1851."

See the photograph of the marble statue of
the Faun
of Praxiteles. Note that the book is more about
the moral transformation of the real faun, Donatello, while the statue
plays more of a role of artistic background to the Romance.

Hilda's Tower (location of the Virgin's Shrine)
was apparently drawn from real life.

"Mr. Thompson took me into the Via
Portoghese, and showed me an old palace, above which rose--not a very
customary feature of the architecture of Rome--a tall, battlemented tower.
At one angle of the tower we saw a shrine of the Virgin, with a lamp,
and all the appendages of those numerous shrines which we see at the
street corners, and in hundreds of places about the city. Three or four
centuries ago this palace was inhabited by a nobleman who had an only son,
and a large, pet monkey, and one day the monkey caught the infant up and
clambered to this lofty turret, and sat there with him in his arms grinning
and chattering like the Devil himself. The father was in despair, but was
afraid to pursue the monkey lest he should fling down the child from the
height of the tower and make his escape. At last he vowed that if the boy
were safely restored to him he would build a shrine at the summit of the
tower, and cause it to be kept as a sacred place forever. By and by the
monkey came down and deposited the child on the ground; the father fulfilled
his vow, built the shrine, and made it obligatory on all future possessors
of the palace to keep the lamp burning before it. Centuries have passed,
the property has changed hands; but still there is the shrine on the giddy
top of the tower, far aloft over the street, on the very same spot where the
monkey sat, and there burns the lamp, in memory of the father's vow. This
being the tenure by which the estate is held, the extinguishment of that
flame might yet turn the present owner out of the palace."

--French and Italian Notebooks, 1883, pages 206-7

[This business of the monkey reminds one not only of King Kong but also
the similar story of Oliver Cromwell's childhood, with which Hawthorne was
no doubt familiar. But he chose to interpret it in favor of Catholicism
here.]